"Grow with That, Walk with That": Hymes, Dialogicality, and Text Collections

This article elaborates upon Dell Hymes's contributions to dialogic anthropology by comparing two accounts of Apache lives, one spoken by Lawrence Mithlo to Harry Hoijer and published in a 1938 text collection, and another spoken by Eva Lupe to the author in 1996. First, I show that neither account is cast by its speaker as neutral information; rather, both are extensions of an oratorical genre labeled bá'hadziih , through which the speaker presents a group with which she identifies to an audience that includes those figured as other. Through bá'hadziih the speaker attempts to transform the relationship between her own group and the addressed others by first invoking what she anticipates to be the image held of her group from the other's point of view and then posing terms for its transformation. I show that a parallel strategy is also evident in a short creation narrative performed by Mithlo for Hoijer. I show that the ethnological framework within which Hoijer casts Mithlo's performances interposes a colonial lens that misrecognizes, with unintended irony, what Mithlo frames as misunderstandings on the part of White people as straightforward statements of fact. By contrast, considerations of genre and addressivity introduced via Hymes's ethnography of communication and ethnopoetics enable a latter-day recognition of the terms of mediation utilized by persons like Mithlo and Lupe to address researchers in ethnographic dialogues. A commentary to this essay by Richard Bauman appears later in this special issue.